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Declan Traill BSc
Detection of light speed anisotropy and Aether wind speed using a small, portable detector.
This paper describes an experiment using a small, cheap, portable Aether wind detector that can be made for just a few hundred dollars and can successfully detect the light speed anisotropy in the Earth’s reference frame and determine its magnitude and direction.
Image 1: The full experimental setup (except for the PC that collects the data and the steel enclosure)
Image 2: The stack up of 10 double-sided PCBs that have the looping copper track etched into it. All PCBs are connected in series.
Image 3: A close up view of the etched copper track on the top PCB.
Image 4: The steel enclosure box that houses the PCB stack, Vector Network Analyzer and cables, to prevent external magnetic and RF interference with the recorded results data.
Image 4: The Azimuth/Altitude of the expected Aether wind at 7:12pm on 11/04/2023 in Melbourne, Australia at the location where the experiment was conducted.
Image 5: The Phase timing graph versus frequency graph for the North/South & East/West directions.
Image 7: The Phase timing difference graph versus frequency graph for the North/South versus East/West directions. The Orange line is covered by the Yellow line from the theoretical model (as they have almost identical values) and is the final average value computed from all of the gathered experimental data. The Green line is a 10-sample running average of the data points.
Progress Update
I have upgraded the Phase detector used in the experiment to get better results. Instead of using a nanoVNA device to scan a range of frequencies, I am now using a tinyPFA device to accurately measure Phase timing differences between Channel 1 and Channel 2 of the device. The tinyPFA device is actually a nanoVNA-H4 device which has been reprogrammed using a firmware image for the tinyPFA functionality (to see how to do this, see the website https://www.tinydevices.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=TinyPFA.Homepage).
I have upgraded the Phase detector used in the experiment to get better results. Instead of using a nanoVNA device to scan a range of frequencies, I am now using a tinyPFA device to accurately measure Phase timing differences between Channel 1 and Channel 2 of the device. The tinyPFA device is actually a nanoVNA-H4 device which has been reprogrammed using a firmware image for the tinyPFA functionality (to see how to do this, see the website https://www.tinydevices.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=TinyPFA.Homepage).
The main difference in the use of the modified device is that both Channel 1 and Channel 2 ports are inputs and the stable clock source used in the experiment must be provided externally from a Signal Generator (or another stable oscillator). For my experiment I am using a 10MHz pure sine wave at 12V from the signal generator. I need the high voltage as the voltage drop across the almost 2km long copper track in my detector is large and I need a sufficient signal to detect at the other end of the long track. This means that I needed to obtain a 20dB attenuator for the signal at the start of the long track, that feeds into Channel 1 of the tinyPFA, otherwise it will be damaged (the signal power must not exceed +10dBm). With this setup I can get about -14dBm in Channel 1 and -26dBm into Channel 2 of the tinyPFA. These levels are sufficient to get a good reading.
After configuring the tinyPFA and connecting it to the free TimeLab software (to display the results), I obtained the average of two consecutive E/W versus N/S phase time difference readings matches the model's expected time by 91.5% and the equivalent Aether wind speed from the detector's readings matches the best known Aether wind speed of 486km/s by 95.68% (corresponding to a wind speed of 465km/s).
In a second, longer run of the measurements I obtained the average of 10 consecutive E/W versus N/S phase time difference readings with an average phase time difference of 5.58E-12 seconds. The model, for the date, time and location of the experiment predicted a phase time difference of 5.66E-12 seconds. So, in this longer run of the experiment, the measured phase timing was 98.60% of the prediction from the model. This corresponds to a measured Aether wind speed of about 482.5km/sec, which matches the previously determined best value from other experiments of 486km/sec at 99.28% the same value.
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